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Comment by alanfalcon | Hacker News Reader

I'd really love to have him study Aphantasia (non-functioning mind's eye) and understand what people with the condition do to compensate.

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I have Aphantasia, nice to see people suddenly becoming aware of this. I'm hoping to see a lot more research in this area in the next few years, but anecdotally I'll say spacial cognition and visual memory are different things, I have the former but not the latter. You don't need a minds eye to have a sense of where things are spatially but given that people with visual recall likely do this task visually, I'm not sure I can explain it.

I have visual recall but I often have a tangible sense of spacial memory. Like I'll feel an almost tingling or aura/presence of an important object in a given vector and magnitude.

Maybe related? But I also get the same kind of extra-sensory feeling when I copy data (doubly so if I cut data) -- like my hand is charged with something extra until I "unload it" by pasting the data. This has saved me many times when I get distracted at work mid-task, and before I go copy some new piece of data I can feel that I haven't pasted in the old data and go take care of that first. (I Wonder if anyone has done a study on this, and how many people experience something similar.)

Never heard of anything like that, interesting. Sounds like some sort of synesthesia.

I share the exact same sensation of being "charged with data", that persists even if I get distracted and completely forget about the content of the clipboard. It's like a very tangible pinpoint for a planned activity.

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